Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Obama back to unnecessary and effete compromise

President Obama must have a serious dysfunction when it comes to bargaining with those that will not budge. He just won reelection based on the majority of Americans disagreeing with the regressive agenda on taxes and spending cuts. So what does he do? He turns around and in his first new test gives in unnecessarily to the very things he not only won on but promised to stick to in negotiations on the fiscal cliff. As a prime example, why is he even considering offering up a significant reduction is social security cost of living increases that will harm our most vulnerable and valuable constituency, our elderly? Robert Reich makes clear that social security has nothing to do with the deficit, as did Ronald Reagan before him.

If cuts need to be made, why not from the defense budget and subsidies to oil companies or corporate welfare? The latter are popular with the majority while cuts to social security are not. Why should we agree to this just to say we are "balanced" and open to compromise? No, it's being open to creating unnecessary suffering by negotiating with really sick people that seem to get off on such suffering while giving that money to the greedy 1%. You do not compromise with this kind of sickness; you defeat it. If Obama would only stand firm the majority would again support him and in the next election the regressives would lose even more seats, likely even their advantage in the House. And in subsequent elections they will self-destruct their Party into obsolescence, a good thing for our society. Fight them and let them continue to shoot themselves in the foot, losing more and more support until the regressive Republican Party is a thing of the past like the Whigs.